"You have to solve Einstein's equations," says black hole modeller Associate Professor Carlos Lousto of RIT. "You end up solving a huge system of equations. It's a really massive problem."

Lousto and his colleagues Associate Professor Manuela Campanelli and Assistant Professor Yosef Zlochower are due to present their results at this week's meeting of the American Physical Society in St Louis.

The discovery of the triple quasar makes it clear that it's also more than academic, Lousto says.

"The most likely event is to have two black holes merge," Lousto says. Next in line is the triple merger, then quadruple merger.

Gravity waves

Among the things discovered in the modelling of three is that the gravitational waves the event produces are quite different than those waves created by two black holes.

Four black holes merging will very likely have yet another gravitational wave signature, Lousto says.

Knowing these signatures in advance is expected to be useful for identifying the sources of real gravitational waves, when they are successfully detected.

"This illustrates a great progress theorists are making in numerical modeling of black hole mergers," says astronomer Professor George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology.

He was one of the discoverers of the triple quasar last year.

"Such processes must have played an important role in the co-evolution of galaxies and their central, supermassive black holes, especially in the first few billion years of the cosmic history."

The trio of real quasars is about 10.5 billion light-years from earth in the constellation Virgo.

In other words, the light from the quasars was emitted from matter falling into the black holes when the universe was a tad more than 3 billion years old.